Christopher Hitchens, Literary Agent Provocateur [audio 8min]

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, British writer and intellectual Christopher Hitchens, a longtime columnist for the left-wing magazine The Nation, surprised many of his comrades on the left with his robust support for the Bush administration's war on terrorism. Hitchens is best known for focusing his unforgiving pen on the likes of Henry Kissinger ("war criminal, liar without conscience, pseudo-scholar, pseudo-academic, pitiless sponsor of dictators abroad"); Mother Teresa ("friend of poverty, enemy of the poor, fundamentalist fanatic"); and Bill Clinton ("a man who was in politics for therapy who wasted eight years of America's time"). His prose usually sparkles or infuriates -- or both. In 1991, he warned against launching the first Gulf War. No more:"We now know we're at war today and so do they and they will pay and pay and pay for it," Hitchens says of proponents of what he calls nihilistic Islamism."They will rue the day when they decided to challenge civilization and democracy and attempt to replace it with theocracy and barbarism." ~Website offers extended story and essay by correspondent Guy Raz, Hitchens audio clips, photos, web links, and on NPR's Mixed Signals blog, reporter Neda Ulaby discusses a conversation with Raz about his interview with Hitchens.